Drink and sport. On the one hand both are incompatible, but by proxy they go hand in in hand.
For instance if Paul O’Connell or Brian O’Driscoll were to arrive back at the team hotel in the am’s before a European Cup final bug eyed from Heineken offering the excuse that they was merely out endorsing the sponsors product, they’d be dropped.
Paul and Brian are allowed to talk about the Heineken Cup, dream about the Heineken Cup, give high falutin interviews in which they get all misty eyed about the exploits of Heineken Cup teams past, but they are not allowed drink from the Heineken Cup, until they win it, by which stage their alcohol tolerance is so low it’s all over after one pint and they’re carted out into the Paddy Wagon feet first.
In Mexico City they refer to the Paddy Wagon as a mother’s heart – cos there’s always room for one more.
Meantime, note the sheer genius of the marketing men at Heineken.They spotted years back that the vast majority of the population are woeful at all sports. We’re beyond useless, as bad as that full back that used ply his trade in the lower echelons of the Football League.
Said defender, a man responsible for three heart attacks and a general sense of unease and foreboding in the ground every time his name appeared on the starting eleven on the match programme, was so harebrained that when the ball would arrive at his feet thousands of anxious fans would scream one word in unison – “concentrate”.
The marketing geniuses at Heineken correctly identified that there are tens of thousands out there, millions even, that are good at drinking and pontificating about sport but absolutely hideous at playing it.
They also correctly identified that a tiny minority, freaks, are actually good at this sport lark, but useless at drinking. It was a no brainer. They used the latter as the vehicle to get the former on board and correctly anticipated that we’d do the drinking for them, whilst they provided the backdrop to our nights out courtesy of winning and training, discussing tactics and other such distractions.
But clever and all as the clever marketing men at Heineken are (and only men can combine drink and sport in such harmony) they didn’t factor Jesus Christ being done in by the Romans and the Irish judiciary into their equation.
Likewise, Limerick’s publicans may be left with no option but to prostrate themselves in front of M’lud and our learned friends in the hope of arriving at a Good Friday Agreement.
Publicans in the Treaty City are up in arms because rugby chiefs, (Celtic League arseholes I believe) in cahoots with TV, rescheduled the upcoming Munster v Leinster Magners League fixture for Good Friday (April 2) – the day the bars are closed.
One Limerick publican said that he was very incensed, while a second bar owner said he was more than very incensed. A third said that while he was incensed that he wouldn’t go as far as to say that he was more incensed than someone that was very incensed. Nevertheless, he confirmed that he was incensed and would remain incensed, going forward.
Cllr Gerry McLoughlin, taking a sabbatical from exchanging pleasantries with match officials, stressed that he was the first to become incensed, adding that staging the game on Good Friday was a disgrace.
In further reaction from Limerick’s elected representatives, Mayor Kevin Kiely said – to tell you the truth I can’t remember what he said. No one ever can.
But why would anyone endorse a fixture that would deny a local economy millions?
We saw this recently when the FAI were offered a home game against Brazil but took the game to London, denying fans the opportunity to see their country at home, fancy that, and the local economy in Dublin millions.
Now rugby chiefs, and surely the IRFU have some say in this matter, are denying the local economy in Limerick an estimated 5m.
Then again, the IRFU is an organization that had no problem selling 80,000 tickets for their games at Croke Park but went away and built a virtual new Stadium at Lansdowne Road with a capacity for just 50,000. This takes quite a bit of forward planning and concentration.
Anyway, an RTE report suggests that some sort of special licence could be granted to the pubs in Limerick so rugby fans can get rodent pouted on the night of the match. Pubs in the rest of the country will be closed – unless they can arrange a rugby game?
So there you have it. An arsehole reschedules one of the key matches on the domestic calendar for the one other day of the year (along with Christmas Day) when the pubs are not allowed to open and watering holes in Limerick may now have to wait on the discretion of a judge to be allowed trade off the 26,000 thousands fans who will attend a game that was originally fixed for Saturday April 3rd – until above arsehole got involved and changed it back to April 2nd.
If the judge is a Catholic, and this decision could come down to one person and his emotional attachment to a Christian deity who was executed by the Romans a few thousand years ago, then Limerick’s publicans could end up losing millions in the teeth of a recession, and all because we have not fully separated Church and State in this country.
The Romans are also to blame for killing Jesus. What did the Romans ever do for us by the way?
The law banning the selling of alcohol on Good Friday and Christmas Day was first introduced in 1927, back in the days when the crozier hovered over the land, back in the days before the clever marketing men at Heineken spotted an opening in the market.
But hold on, I have a solution. Why doesn’t the arsehole that rearranged this fixture pull it back another 24 hours to April 1st, a date that would be entirely appropiate given the almighty fuck up they’ve caused by interfering with the original date in the first place.
Another solution would be to drop all of this Good Friday lark and start behaving like a liberal European democracy. But that would be just mad in a 21st century society, wouldn’t it Ted?
Incidentally , drink will be on sale inside Thomond Park on the night of the match but not outside the ground. Try explaining that to Johnny Foreigner.
Meanwhile, from a sporting perspective, what fuckwit pencilled in this fixture – face it, if Munster and Leinster meet in tag rugby game at this stage they’ll be trying to murder each other – a week before both provinces are involved in crucial European Cup games?
Did above fuckwit imagine that Munster, who’ve qualified for the knockout stages of the European Cup for the last two thousand years, and defending European champions Leinster, would not reach the business end of the blue riband tournament of European club rugby?
Only in Ireland.
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Like Ronan here, I went home with two smiles on my face, and Bullet had another two, but that was fine. There were enough smiles to go round for everybody last night, and even though we were all soaked to the skin, nobody cared. It isn’t every day you welcome the mighty London Wasps, reigning European Champions, into your football ground and send them home with nothing.
And let me add that London Wasps are not only the Champions, but a very hard crowd of bastards indeed. Serious professionals led by a consummate professional in Lawrence Dallaglio, and an outfit to be both respected and feared. A bunch who did not come here for fun, or for a weekend in the pub, but to extinguish our challenge. Unfortunately for them, it didn’t work that way, as Munster calmly and professionally dismantled them, outplayed them, outwitted them and sent them home bereft of title and of hope. And wet.
